With the advent of high speed internet access whether via wireline or wireless connection accessing television or other multimedia services become reality. However, distributing TV in an IP (Internet Protocol) network is a challenging task. TV viewers expect nothing but the highest quality, while the IPTV (Internet Protocol TV) service itself puts higher requirements on the IP network than other services. The ability to act quickly and decisively in addressing any problems in the IPTV delivery chain from a head end to a subscriber is absolutely the key to success.
However, diagnosis of IP TV service is a non-trivial problem. The modern telecommunication network is a large-scale distributed system composed of complex inter-operating sub-networks. Each service deployment involves a number of heterogeneous network entities (servers, routers, switches) with different functionalities (authentication, resource control, etc). Any entity in the network may be faulty, e.g. out of order or of poor performance. The large amount of entities and the complicated (direct or indirect) dependencies in many cases bury the faulty entities. This is demonstrated in FIG. 1, which shows example of user steps in video-on-demand shop TV service. It is not important for understanding of the present invention that is to be described what are the individual steps, what is important is that if any of the steps leading to the service goes wrong, the service would fail.
On the other hand, current network and service monitoring tools provides little reliable indication of where the problem lies. Thus, when a service like IPTV goes down, it may take the service providers considerable amount of time before the cause of the problem is found.
There are known systems that can detect service quality degradation like servicEye or Agama IPTV Quality Assurance. This is, however not enough because the service provider needs to know the causes of the degradation.
ITU-T Recommendation G.1081 defines performance monitoring points for IPTV which will allow the service provider/network operator to monitor the performance of the complete IPTV service delivery to the end user. The management platform entities manage domains and collect parameters from monitoring points, perform performance analysis, and generate reports. Through network-wide deployment of monitors (performance monitoring points), it is possible to localize the problems to a network segment (or a network domain), but undoubtedly this would be very expensive to achieve high granularity of monitoring. Moreover, service diagnosis requires more than just collecting metrics like packet loss ratio and delay.
In consequence monitoring, diagnosis and fault reporting in services providing multimedia contents over IP network is not properly addressed.